Is it worth unlocking the bootloader on my phone? It’s a Samsung with One UI 7.0 (I’ve been avoiding upgrading to 8.0 since they don’t let you unlock it after that). I just want to avoid having Google Services and AI installed. I use my phone to take photos of my art / send it to friends on signal and hate the idea of it being scanned by AI. I use a camera and gallery from fdroid but somehow the default photos app still has access (I know because it makes GIFs of pictures I took even though I marked permissions as “not allowed”). I also would love to get rid of the default apps I don’t use. While I can unlock the bootloader (for now), I can’t install a custom ROM because there are none compatible with my phone, so will I just be forced into using 8.0 at some point anyway? :( ATP I’m pretty much ready to give up smartphones and get a digital camera for anything I don’t feel comfortable feeding to tech companies.
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Not an expert, but I’ve been looking into this and it seems like grapheneOS is the way to go if you really want control and security on a modern phone with timely updates (you would have to switch devices). The timely-ness of updates/patches on other platforms is a big criticism that I saw brought up a lot in disussions online. Not sure how much of a problem that truly is, if at all, but it is something to look into before committing to a big change.
Also one thing to look into before doing anything drastic would be taking advantage of shizuku with something like Canta. As I understand it, shizuku is like an inter-app request mediator that is able to abuse wireless debugging access to grant root-like permissions to linked applications without requiring root access or an unlocked bootloader. This should allow you to do some serious debloating.
From what I have read, living without google play services is possible to an extent (using FOSS alternative), but can be difficult / not 100% due to how google has positioned the bundled play services specifically as an authority in modern android
Thanks for the suggestion. I think I’ll try tweaking things with shizuku first but will definitely consider getting a phone that supports custom ROMs in the future. I just have this one because it was inexpensive and had headphone jack (another thing that’s gone the way of the dodo). :)